The importance of Guanxi for companies seeking to win business in China varies depending on the sector. Trying to secure shelf space for beer? Guanxi is pretty important. Trying to win a $10MM semiconductor deal at Huawei? Not as important.
I found that merit counts more than Guanxi when selling high tech to big companies in […]
Archive for the 'Components' Category
Fiber to the Home (FTTH) and Passive Optical Networks (PON) in particular have received an inordinate amount of attention from the financial community in the last year. Attention has been focused at every level of the value chain, from component companies that make chips and optics to Telecom Equipment and Set-Top box makers to Carriers […]
In a stroke of timing that a few people have pointed out cannot be a coincidence (and I can assure you it is) Bookham Inc (BKHM) CEO Giorgio Annania pens an article for CompoundSemiconductor.net about the future business models of the optical component industry and what role he intends for Bookham to play. I recently […]
Recently, I sat down with Giorgio Anania, CEO of Bookham Technology (BKHM). We discussed a number of things, including the emerging competition of Asian optical component manufacturers. My conversation with him was about the industry in general, and not specific to Bookham.
We like to identify macro technology trends and disruptions then determine the best way […]
A common question I receive is “What optical component equities do you like”.
My answer is pretty simple.
We currently own no optical component equities whatsoever. I believe the industry environment is a hypercompetitive, oversupplied, commodity business. Until consolidation takes place a company could be run by the Steve Jobs of Optical and still not make money. […]
I reviewed the slides presented by Paul Otellini at the Intel (INTC) 2006 Annual Meeting.
The most interesting one puts the recent market share decline in perspective. What surprised me was the big leap back in ‘95, when the Pentium branding pulled the rug out from under AMD (AMD) and Cyrix who had ‘cloned’ the […]
Cisco (CSCO), Oracle (ORCL), Sun (SUNW), and EMC (EMC) were the darlings of the internet boom and were referred to as the ‘Four Horsemen‘. Your broker was overheard in 2000 “Yes, things are in fact a bit irrational but these companies have real products, revenues, and earnings and are investment-grade leaders of the new […]
I received a good question on the Wintegra Inc. (WNTG) post I made last week. I felt the response was worth a post on it’s own. Please remember this is not investment advice, and not a negative outlook on Wintegra as a comapny, just my opinion of something that needs to be considered when attaching […]
Get ready to party like it’s 1999 - Wintegra, Inc. (WNTG), a network processor company, is going public. Prospectus here. Financial summary here.
Wait - the mob cries “This Time It’s Different” - Wintegra doesn’t make those ridiculously large 10G and 2.5G NPU’s that tech messiah George Gilder preached were the salvation of the coming optical […]
Intel corp (INTC) lands on Page A1 of the WSJ with a story covering their Analyst Day presentation in New York yesterday. The big news that is getting widespread coverage in many media outlets- including BusinessWeek - is that they are cutting $1BB (8%) in spending but without across the board job cuts.
The big problem […]
I attended the Lightreading “Future of Optical Networking” conference in New York last week.
I had high expectations for the conference based on one I attended two years ago on Ethernet in the WAN. At that conference there were a number of participants from start ups and established companies who led a vigorous debate about what […]
Broadcom (BRCM) is a scary company to compete with. They execute aggressively and have backup plans for when they don’t. They can bring to bear ridiculous amounts of resources, and justify the profligate fixed R&D expense on any one project by targeting high volume markets.
Here’s a question from Fridays Broadcom earnings call that highlighted yet […]
Tomorrow’s Saturday edition of the WSJ has a short article on Vitesse Semiconductor (VTSS) and the cancellation of Monday’s earnings call.
According to a release made today by Vitesse, the suspension of three executives was related to the “integrity of documents” involving its stock-option program. They also cancelled the earnings release and call scheduled for Monday.
The […]
I’m in New York at a Lightreading conference. Trading has been halted in Vitesse Semiconductor (NASDAQ: VTSS) all day.
Consolidation in the communication semiconductor area is long overdue. The length of the delay (5 hours now) would indicate that someone, somewhere was surprised.
There is also the WSJ article on options backdating, though it’s hard to see […]
I covered the PMC-Sierra Inc. (PMCS) acquisition of Passave 6 days ago.
While I was not given the opportunity to ask questions during the conference call, I did receive a written response to questions I phoned in and left on voice mail.
Question #1 What products are expected to benefit from the acquisition, and what type of […]
PMC-Sierra Inc. (PMCS) announced at the close today that they are acquiring Passave, a company we have - written - about - extensively, for $300M in stock. In fact, I predicted PMC-Sierra would enter this business through acquisition, though I thought Teknovus would be the better path.
Our acquisition of Passave brings PMC-Sierra an experienced and […]
PortalPlayer (PLAY) continues to follow a trajectory of diversification from it’s core Apple (AAPL) iPod business. Portalplayer currently derives 90% of it’s revenue from Apple iPod and Nano hardware sales and is working on a new chip in partnership with Microsoft (MSFT) called Preface. Preface is the brain around which Microsoft Sideshow is built. We’ve […]
The Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) ratified their full specification today.
While reading this news item, I also noticed that Entropic publiclly announced their partnership with Motorola to provide MoCA chipsets in Verizon’s FiOS TV deployment. I broke the news a few weeks earlier (after sitting on it for two months following CES).
Investors Business Daily (IBD) interviewed PMC Sierra (PMCS) CEO Bob Bailey. The article starts out with the standard ‘pumper’ language, talking about analyst upgrades and how comm-semi is climbing out of the doldrums, lead by access and VoIP. Not a huge amount of enlightening info for those familiar with the business, but great fodder for […]
I returned last week from what was the most upbeat optical networking conference (OFC/NFOEC) in five years.
Then Footnoted.org, a site devoted to extracting interesting nuggets from SEC filings decides to unearth memories from before the dark times… before the empire. I’ll just quote the post.
In memory of the tech wreck that occurred 6 years ago […]
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